Tour de France coverage

Yes, saw that from the bike cams in Yorkshire, never seen that effect before from COFDM link kit, anyone
discovered what kit the French host broadcaster are using yet ?

They always have that at the Tour, and I *think* I've seen it on the London Marathon. I think it's scanning the new frames that have been decoded properly, while also showing the end of the bad frames that were lost. It's very weird.

Looks a little better than just dropping to a still frame as a lot of gear does these days, or going black/mush like it used to a few years ago.

Controversially I've enjoyed the coverage so far on ITV4/1. I would expect the occassional technical blip, syncing issues and the Stage 1 start miss was a real pity but from a technical and viewer's point of view I found it fascinating. If you've worked on OB's you'll know how tough it is - you call a shot from the Helo and it suddenly moves etc - a lot worse can go wrong in a 5 hour + live programme. What was perhaps ironic is that in the Whafe valley where the early stages took place ITV4 is not avaialable on Freeview, so unless you've SAT or t'web you miss the latter part of TX. A bit of a transmission own goal IMHO.

Livetools provides the majority of the RF kit.

The "scanning" thing is just the same as a normal MPEG intraslice, you can force Gigawave / Link kit to do them too, although I've only ever seen them do vertical wipes. Basically every frame you send a line of clean, new data, with the rest of the frame being made up of the previous data with changes applied. The alternative is an intraframe, where you send a whole new frame out at intervals, which when you get corruption, you end up with mush until the whole image will suddenly snap back to clean.

The challenge with keeping the helicopters in shot is they might be about to reposition / change shot, when you loose your ground level pictures, resulting in you cutting to them just as the camera op puts his finger on the joystick.

Thanks for the information! The nerd in me appreciates it.

When the helicopter was changing shot it was when the riders were in the Limehouse Link, you'd think they could tell them to keep the shot steady or do a nice zoom or pan at that time.

Does France2 get a different mix of the race than the rest of the world? Also slightly different graphics? I'm not sure the World Feed has "France2Sport" on them, do they?

It will be the French2 unilateral being received, it's a little different to the world feed taken by itv4/Eurosport.

The local radio station in Cambridge did a pretty good job of covering Stage 3 (especially the start and the Cambridge leg which ITV cut to a break during).

I would say that though

I do hope the team were standing up and walking throughout to make it more dynamic.

Just to clear up any confusion, I saw a graphic on it introducing the team on Moto 2 (one of the bike camera teams) and it had France2Sport on it. Not sure I've seen that on any of the world feed graphics on ITV.

It's possible I could be massively wrong.

No, we were desk bound the whole time. Of course we moved around, I wouldn't want to disappoint you Bilky.

One of the commentators kept going on about the School Children who got a bus in at 7.30am to have a french breakfast, and were soo exited. They apparently also made a sign which the helicopter was supposed to catch, which it didn't. Don't know how many times he had mentioned it, probably over 10 times. Shouldn't they of had contact with the cameraman/pilots in the helicopters? Or because of all the stations using the stream that wouldn't be possible?